It's essentially the opposite idea of "don't rest on your laurels." It assumes that once you've gained a reputation or garnered recognition, you no longer need to keep trying very hard. It's an odd aphoristic contract: you can file it under cynical sayings.

It's essentially the opposite idea of "don't rest on your laurels." It assumes that once you've gained a reputation or garnered recognition, you no longer need to keep trying very hard. It's an odd aphoristic contract: you can file it under cynical sayings.

I thought resting on your laurels meant that a person relied too much upon past accomplishments to carry him through the day. So if I did something right at work twenty years ago, that should be good enough to get me a pay raise today, no?
Or something like that...
Instead, "Crea fama..." means, "now that everybody thinks you are a dumb liar nobody will believe you even if you tell the truth or get smart all of the sudden!".
I think...

I found this explanation. The first meaning would correspond to resting on one's laurels. I have to say that I never heard the expression "Give a dog a bad name and hang it," although Google turned that up as an equivalent, apparently for the second meaning:

Maybe it's just the use we give them in Buenos Aires, but the truth is that we use those two phrases in very different situations. For example, when a person wins a prize and we say: "don't rest on your laurels and keep on with the hard work!" Like a warning...
In the other case imagine a very lazy individual who has never worked in his life. One day he says that he will start working and everybody laughs at him, because they don't believe a word. That's the situation in which we would use "házte la fama y échate a dormir"